The triumph of Brexitball Our football style has followed politics

A ball over the top. A big center-forward muscles the center-back out of the way and then fires past the goalkeeper. It happened to be Sunday, and Manchester City’s 1-0 win over Brentford, but Erling Haaland’s winner could have been a goal from almost any period in football history. It was all the more striking because this was Pep Guardiola’s City, a team noted for their quick, short passing on the ground — a team noted for not going over the top.

Brentford’s best chance also came from a long ball, misjudged by a defender who headed towards his own goal, letting in Brentford’s mountainous new striker, Igor Thiago. Modern football has become throwback football — a return to something basic, traditional, earthy. Across the Premier League, fussy ministrations and careful planning are out; the big man and uncompromising directness are back. Gone is the approach of cosmopolitan globalized technocracy and in its place has come something grittier, more visceral, perhaps more immediately appealing, something that — at least at first glance — feels more English. More like Brexitball. Who needs patient build-up or sophisticated theorizing when you can just get it launched? In football as in politics, the big man is back.

There will be those who think this is absurd, that it is ludicrous to discern in the way a team plays some sort of expression of a broader culture or societal trend. But if we accept that literature or music or architecture reflects the world around it, why should football be any different? Like any other cultural mode, football presents its practitioners with a series of challenges, some practical and some aesthetic: how could the way in which they answer them not be conditioned by the prevailing sensibility, even if they are willfully striking against it?

To understand how we got here, you have to go back to 2008, a moment of crisis for Europe’s political technocrats as they wrestled with the Eurozone crisis — and coincidentally, a major turning point in the game’s tactical evolution. Before 2008, there was only one occasion when the average number of goals in the knockout stages of the Champions League was higher than three. From then until 2020, there was only one occasion when that average dropped below three.

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As it happened, 2008 was also the year that Guardiola took over as head coach of Barcelona — but clearly something was already beginning to shift. No coach, not even one as gifted as Guardiola, can have that sort of impact in his first season. Changes in pitch technology had improved playing surfaces to the point that a player could almost take his first touch for granted; as the ball approached him, he didn’t have to give it his full concentration, waiting for a bobble — but could already be assessing his passing options. That made the game more chess-like. It was less about the ability to react than about strategy. How could players move around to create overloads or to isolate defenders? At the same time, the liberalization of the offside law meant defensive lines sat deeper, increasing the effective playing area. There was also a crackdown on intimidatory tackling, which allowed technically accomplished, creative but less physically imposing players to play a greater role. This was the era of Xavi and Andrés Iniesta, David Silva and Luka Modrić.

So Guardiola emerged into an environment perfectly suited to his approach. As a player at Barcelona under Johan Cruyff and Louis van Gaal, he was schooled in the Total Football played by the Dutch in the early Seventies and managed to repurpose the style for the new era. He was extraordinarily successful, first at Barcelona, and then at Bayern Munich and Manchester City. His way of playing was derided by his detractors as tiki-taka — an onomatopoeic term coined in the Eighties by the no-nonsense, Basque coach Javier Clemente for passing football that went nowhere. He preferred to call it juego de posición — the positional game — though Pepism might be a more useful label, given how closely identified it is with one man.

Whatever the label, the style became hegemonic. It became broadly accepted that “good” football — progressive football, the football elite sides had to play — must follow the Guardiola template. You try to dominate possession, and when the ball is lost, you win it back by pressing aggressively with a high defensive line. But Guardiola was also a cautious coach; his priority was always control. As the background conditions made retention of possession easier it became possible to defend by keeping the ball from the opposition. When Spain, playing a particularly sterile version of Pepism, won the 2010 World Cup, they did so by winning all four knockout fixtures 1-0.

Given the globalized nature of modern football, it’s probable that there has never been such consensus across the game as to how it should be played. But not everybody liked it. A vague culture war grew up. Did you admire the level of control, the triumph of tactics and technical ability — or did you find this attrition by possession all desperately dull? Did you yearn for the old days, for big tackles and working the channels? Did you seek a footballing identity outside what the European technocracy deemed acceptable, progressive, correct?

It should realistically be possible to hold both views simultaneously, to see this degree of control as impressive while acknowledging that there was something slightly bloodless about it — but that’s not how modern media works. Various figures within the game have recently taken to claiming that Guardiola, the most revolutionary and influential figure in football for 50 years, has somehow “ruined football” — a list diverse enough to include the former England manager Fabio Capello, the former USA goalkeeper Tim Howard and the Colchester striker Lyle Taylor.

[su_pullquote]”It should realistically be possible to hold both views simultaneously, to see this degree of control as impressive while acknowledging that there was something slightly bloodless about it.”[/su_pullquote]

If there is an issue, it probably lies less with Guardiola than his imitators. Guardiola himself has never stopped evolving — as can be seen in the way that two of his former assistants, Arsenal’s Mikel Arteta and Chelsea’s Enzo Maresca, have their sides play in such different ways having learned from the master at different stages of his career. Certain core principles have remained, but Guardiola has never stood still. He’s a pragmatist. It’s his disciples, the likes of Xavi, Jorge Sampaoli and Russell Martin who are the ideologues — who insist on playing their way however inappropriate that may be for their players or the circumstances.

Over the past year, though, Guardiola has acknowledged that he is no longer at the vanguard of the game’s evolution. “Today, modern football is not positional,” he said. “You have to ride the rhythm.” He was talking specifically about how there are now so many fixtures that there is no time to drill their players into efficient positional machines — and so, it is now external factors that are shaping the evolution of the game rather than individual coaches. Guardiola has been moving for several years now towards a more physical model of play, while against both Manchester United and Arsenal this season he had his City side sit deep, eschew possession and play on the counter-attack. Against Arsenal they had only 34% of the ball. Only once before had any of his sides ever dropped below 40% in a league game. This felt shocking — a Götterdämmerung. And as the one true faith falls away, what is left is confusion.

In the gloom, without an obvious ideology to follow, many teams have gone back to basics. Football has, abruptly, become more direct and more focused on set-plays. Over the first month of this Premier League season, non-penalty goals from set-plays rose by 21%. Long balls are up 7%. High turnovers (that is, occasions when the ball is won back in the opposition’s defensive third, an indicator of a high press) are down 14%.

On the level of personnel, inverted wingers and false nines are out, and in their place has returned something more traditional. Football at its simplest level is about putting the ball in the net, and who better to do that than an old-fashioned, physically imposing number 9? The summer transfer window was characterized by the great carousel of center-forwards: Liverpool spent £125m on Alexander Isak and £100m on Hugo Ekitiké; Manchester United spent £65m on Benjamin Šeško; Newcastle spent £65m on Nick Woltemade; Arsenal spent £55m on Viktor Gyökeres; Chelsea spent £30m on Liam Delap; Tottenham brought in Randal Kolo Muani on loan. That’s six of a putative Big Seven shelling out on center-forwards over six feet tall. The odd one out is City, who began the trend — Guardiola as usual leading where others follow — by signing the 6’ 5” Norwegian striker Erling Haaland in 2022. Not since the Eighties have big men been so in demand.

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As the dominant, often over-intellectualized, globalized liberal consensus falls away, so there is a demand for something more straightforward, more direct. For somebody who gets things done without worrying about retaining possession while a structure is established to rebuff a potential counter-attack should the ball be lost. Deal with that if it happens; for now, get it to the big man. There is a weariness with Pepism, a background sense that it is the ideology of a dominant international elite that has spent the past 20 years enriching itself at the expense of those lower down the economic scale.

The Champions League is now the preserve of, at most, a dozen sides. The superclubs dominate like never before. The gulf between the Premier League and Championship has never been so vast. Traditional fans are increasingly priced out in favor of wealthy tourists and globalization is destroying the community function of major clubs. The ticket prices for next summer’s World Cup, released last week, are just the latest example of a game that has lost touch with its roots, with most costing several hundred dollars. This used to be the working man’s ballet. And so there is a desire to go back — back to a perhaps illusory simpler past when the game was open to all, when it was possible to compete without being owned by a state, an oligarch or a private equity group, when football was a simple game, unadulterated by boffins with iPads, in which defenders defended and attackers attacked.

There are tactical-evolutionary reasons for a post-Pep reset, but it’s surely no coincidence that the form that it’s taken is this one. As politics has become more direct, so has football; as strength, unencumbered by subtlety, becomes a virtue in one sphere, so it does in the other. Football is part of culture, inevitably influencing it and being influenced by it. They may be very different people with very different views, but the turn to Haaland, Šeško and Gyökeres stems from the same place as the turn to Donald Trump, Viktor Orbán and Javier Milei.

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Jonathan Wilson is a columnist for the Guardian, the editor of the Blizzard, the co-host of the podcast It Was What It Was and author of 12 books on football history and one novel.

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